The consequences of the presidency of Donald Trump will be debated for decades to come—but for the Chinese leadership, its meaning is already clear. China’s rulers believe that the past four years have shown that the United States is rapidly declining and that this deterioration has caused Washington to frantically try to suppress China’s rise. […]
In an echo of President Warren G. Harding’s campaign a century earlier, Joe Biden has promised Americans a return to normalcy and, on matters of foreign policy, has cast himself as the ultimate anti-Trump—building bridges where Donald Trump has needlessly burned them; embracing multilateralism where Trump has espoused only “America First”; and striving for strategic […]
Nobody can pretend to know how President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis will unfold, but some fallout for U.S. national security will be impossible to avoid. What sort of distortions will the illness introduce to foreign policy? That’s harder to say. The Trump administration, after all, has had no baseline of normalcy from which to estimate […]
Estimating the long-term effect of the current pandemic is not an exact prediction of the future, but an exercise in weighing probabilities and adjusting current policies. When envisioning the international order in 2030, five scenarios stand out. Read Here | Project Syndicate
In just a few months, the United Kingdom’s overall policy toward China has changed dramatically. Until recently, Downing Street was famously defining itself as “China’s best partner in the West” and was committed to intensifying its proclaimed “golden era” of relations with Beijing. Read Here | The Diplomat
Neither a nostalgic quest for the old liberal order nor an isolationist retrenchment will ultimately serve U.S. interests or allow Washington to successfully navigate the world. The country has a narrowing window in which to reconfigure its foreign policy to ensure that it remains mighty even though it is no longer the uncontested superpower. Read […]
An extraordinary consensus exists among historians, political scientists, diplomats, national security officials, and other experts that the stakes of the U.S. presidential election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden this November rise to these portentous historical standards. Read Here | Foreign Policy
The wreckage at the State Department runs deep. Career diplomats have been systematically sidelined and excluded from senior Washington jobs on an unprecedented scale. The picture overseas is just as grim, with the record quantity of political appointees serving as ambassadors matched by their often dismal quality. Read Here | Foreign Affairs
After an initial “Are you kidding?!” cooler-headed Biden advisers grudgingly admit that maybe, just maybe, some of the current president’s approaches are worth considering. It makes political sense, for example, to take a harder line toward Beijing, given how negatively the U.S. public now views China. In other cases, such as keeping the U.S. Embassy […]
CSIS’s Risk and Foresight Group created four plausible, differentiated scenarios to explore the changing geopolitical landscape of 2025-2030, including the potential lasting first- and second-order effects of Covid-19. The scenarios center on the relative power and influence of the United States and China and the interaction between them, along with detailed consideration of other major […]
looking beyond borders 